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Noreetuh and the Eddy

Noreetuh and the Eddy

CreditBen Russell for The New York Times

Any Hawaiian honeymooner who’s been off the plane for more than an hour can tell you that poke rhymes with O.K. and that tuna poke typically means raw ahi cut up and mixed with soy sauce, seaweed and so on.

But the people at the next table were stumped when they saw it on the menu of Noreetuh, which has been offering tastes of Hawaii in the East Village since March.

“What’s poke?” one of them asked, rhyming it with Coke.

After a silence, a man sitting with her spoke up. “It’s a fish,” he said. Pause. “A kind of tuna.”

This exchange suggested some of the challenges facing Noreetuh’s chef, Chung Chow, along with his partners, Jin Ahn and Gerald San Jose. Island seafood and produce fill the walk-ins at contemporary Honolulu restaurants like MW or the Pig and the Lady, but they rarely reach the island of Manhattan. A knowledgeable audience can’t be imported, either. While islanders can be counted on to know exactly which local dish Alan Wong is playing around with, the average New Yorker has almost no idea what the residents of the 50th state eat. Don’t they like … Spam?

Sure, among other things. Mr. Chow, who was raised in Hawaii and cooked at Lincoln Ristorante and Per Se, goes out of his way to treat Hormel’s arrestingly pink canned meat product as if it were an heirloom ingredient. Stuffed into supple agnolotti and accessorized with hon-shimeji mushrooms; semi-juicy, soy-cured spring almonds; and a mob of bonito flakes (waving their hands in the air like they just don’t care), it could almost pass for mortadella.

Photo

Bacon tater tots at the Eddy.Credit
Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

It may be the most elegant dish on Mr. Chow’s menu, although it gets stiff competition from the monkfish liver torchon, a pink button surrounded by jellied passion fruit. Lightly pickled pears soften the passion fruit’s brassy tendencies. Mash the fruit and fish liver together on a sweet dinner roll from King’s Hawaiian bakery, and you have one of the most exciting tastes to wash up on Manhattan’s shores this year.

With prime ingredients, carefully organized plates and nonviolent menu prices, Mr. Chow seems intent on making Hawaiian classics presentable for their introduction to New York. Four or five garlic shrimp stand side by side on a long column of rice, offering the same pleasurable assault of garlic-flecked butter that you’d get from a big messy pile slopped onto a paper plate by one of the shrimp trucks of Oahu. And however you pronounce it, Mr. Chow’s poke is classical, generous and slightly Japanese-leaning, made from firm, cool bigeye tuna, diced and slicked down with sesame oil. Frills of seaweed carry the heat of tobanjan, the spicy Japanese bean paste.

Neatness counts for only so much, though, and some dishes are more fastidious than flavorful. The pork in panko-crusted croquettes isn’t very emphatic, and the katsu sauce on the side needs more kick, too. A different poke, with octopus and fingerling potatoes, has only a flicker of the tuna’s personality. White asparagus looks very nice alongside crumbled Chinese sausage and chopped eggs, but the combination doesn’t go very far.

Noreetuh has plenty of dishes for a successful first visit. Dinner will be particularly fun for wine lovers because Mr. Ahn has compiled an overachieving list of German rieslings, Burgundies in both colors, grower Champagnes and more far-flung treats. Better still, the prices are low; just by sticking to your budget, you can drink at a higher level than usual.

Noreetuh may have a trickier time converting new diners into regulars, though. The two dining rooms, while tasteful enough, don’t have anything you could really call atmosphere. Noreetuh means “playground” in Korean, and the owners seem to want to give a party. But where did they find their DJ.? A Motown hit parade is followed by “Yellow Submarine,” and then by Taylor Swift, Natalie La Rose and, gosh, is that really Taylor Swift, twice in one night?

At the moment, there’s something a little cautious about the whole enterprise. But the last time I went, I ate a bowl of spaghetti, new to the menu, that points in the right direction. Richly oily smoked butterfish was folded in among buttered noodles, bright orange with fiery little capsules of spicy cod roe. This wasn’t a polite exercise in cultural diplomacy; it was a shut-up-and-eat dish, and if a third Taylor Swift song had played right at that moment, I wouldn’t have cared.

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The Eddy

Another small, modest looking restaurant called the Eddy sits right around the corner, on East Sixth Street’s disappearing row of interchangeable curry spots. The Eddy is so small and modest looking, in fact, that after it opened last spring, I almost decided not to review it at all, on the theory that when a restaurant has just over 30 seats and doesn’t seem to have any trouble filling them, there isn’t much point in driving more people there.

The chef is Brendan McHale, and I wasn’t always sold on his cooking. I would have liked some of his dishes better if they hadn’t reminded me of slightly better things I’d eaten elsewhere, like the burrata served, as at Estela, in an herbaceous puddle of chlorophyll. Others, like the strangely bloated gnocchi or the dull, spongy lamb loin served with pellets of teff spaetzle that looked like rabbit feed, were easy to forget.

But other dishes were wonderful. There were unimprovable roasted potatoes with strips of rib-eye whose dry-aged intensity was amplified by the low-key funk of melted Brie. And the soft-shell crab with a peppery arugula pesto that I kept eating after the crab was gone. And the jiggly, just-set cardamom panna cotta with crystals of rhubarb granité on top. And the airy chips of fried beef tendon, spread with Greek yogurt and dotted by smoky trout roe. Like Mr. McHale’s bacon tater tots, which wear little bright-green berets of puréed sweet peas, the tendon puffs disappeared with a crunch and left behind a strong desire for more. I would say that both hors d’oeuvres were smart cocktail party food, but I have never been invited to a cocktail party this smart.

And then I thought about how extremely pleasant everybody is at the Eddy, starting with the bartenders, who look up and smile each time a new customer walks in, as if they lived in the opening credits of a sitcom. I remembered the drinks they made, which are as good as the ones at a dedicated cocktail bar. I recalled the compact well-priced wine list, and how I never picked a bottle that I didn’t enjoy a little more than I’d expected.

When I went back to the Eddy, I noticed how quickly the people I brought settled in and got comfortable under the timbered rafters and low ceiling that make the dining room look like a well-kept old tavern. And how easy it was to hear one another, even when the place was crowded.

The Eddy, in other words, is one of those restaurants that gets so many little details right that your main course can be a little shaky and you can still walk out happy. That’s a rare thing, no accident when it happens, and the reason all those seats are so often full.